Processing Defeat
This final chapter examines texts that follow the three basic options available at the end of the war: intransigence and denial, silence and moving ahead, or confronting and processing the past. Death camp commandant Rudolf Höß’s memoir is paradigmatic of the attitude of denial that many former Nazis displayed at the Nuremberg Trials and later Nazi trials. In contrast, journalist Marta Hillers implies in her memoir an eagerness to leave the past behind and go on with her life. Young Ingeborg Bachmann, who grew up in a Nazi-friendly environment in small-town Austria, learned from a British soldier the truth about National Socialism and embarked upon a life-long journey of critical fact-finding and self-reflection.
The Memoir of Auschwitz Commandant Rudolf Höß
By May of 1945, Germans understood that the victorious Allies would not tolerate continued expressions of allegiance to the Third Reich. Only the most fanatical or least-informed individuals refused to acknowledge the new reality. The major defendants at the Nuremberg Trials held by the Allies after the Second World War were among the unrepentant. The most notorious Nazi leaders, including Hitler, Göbbels, and Himmler, had committed suicide or, like Hitler’s successor Martin Bormann, had fled the country. Göring, the Commander of the German Air Force (Luftwaffe), eventually killed himself after trying to play a star role at the trial. Rudolf Hess, Hitler’s former secretary, his architect Albert Speer, and Baldur von Schirach, among others, served sentences in Spandau prison. Having remained in the public eye, they had little choice but to disavow the legality of the Allied military tribunal, declaring Allied judges unqualified to rule on acts committed during the Third Reich.
The autobiographical notes of the former Commandant of Auschwitz, Rudolf Franz Ferdinand Höß, cover the years 1900–1947.3 The self-characterization in the memoir reads like a case study of the stereotypical Nazi male. There are obvious parallels in the trajectory of Höß’s self-narrative and Hitler’s personal account in Mein Kampf. Both authors tell from-rags-to-riches stories and style themselves as self-made men. Höß, the son of a civil servant, appears to have resorted to intransigence early in life as a survival tool in his oppressive birth-family. While still a teenager, he ran away from home and enlisted in the military to serve in the First World War. Thereafter, he joined a Freikorps, spent some time in jail, and eventually signed up for the Death Head SS in charge of the concentration camp system. He achieved the rank of an SS Obersturmbannführer (lieutenant colonel) and served as the Commandant of Auschwitz from 1940 to 1943. In a supervisory position, he helped to coordinate the deportation of the Jews of Hungary. After the German surrender, he assumed a false identity, was captured by the British, and made a witness statement at the Nuremberg Trial. In 1946–47, he stood trial in Cracow and was executed by hanging in Auschwitz in 1947. While awaiting his execution, he wrote the extensive report about his life and career which will be discussed here.
Steven Paskuly, editor of the English translation of Höβ’s memoir titled Death Dealer, writes that Höβ, by his own admission, had been the “greatest mass murderer of all time,” and apparently took pride in having been in charge of the operations of Auschwitz-Birkenau.4 Höß obviously did not grasp the
Following the pattern of the educational novel, Höß begins his memoir with his childhood. He provides details about his experiences in the First World War, his activities in the paramilitary Freikorps, including a murder charge and the ensuing imprisonment. He reminisces about his participation in the Artamans (a radical right-wing organization) and his career in the SS, from junior-level assignments in Dachau to his promotion to camp leader in Sachsenhausen and his post of Commandant at Auschwitz. He writes as an omniscient narrator with astonishing precision about dates and events, specifying the names of fellow officers, superiors, and subordinates. Höß characterizes himself as forthright and disciplined, mature for his years already as a boy, and later in life a law-abiding citizen who had been unjustly incarcerated for being a patriot. In his view, he was a model organizer, and an officer who upheld the strictest ethical principles. Frequently, Höß’s positive self-characterization clashes with his descriptions of his interactions with other people.
A careful reading reveals discrepancies between the facts and Höß’s self-serving interpretations. He discusses as a formative experience in his youth a brawl with a classmate, who broke his foot when Höß pushed him down a staircase. He dismisses the injury as a trifle and denies responsibility.6 Another event involves his exploits as a boy soldier in the First World War and the killing of an enemy soldier, which he experienced as exhilarating: „Mein erster Toter!“7 His lack of empathy combined with the automatic dismissal of guilt, even to himself, is a recurrent theme. For example, Höß seems to have forgotten that he was incarcerated at Brandenburg for political murder. Instead, he describes his role as that of a student of human nature and of “real” criminals, his fellows prisoners. In retrospect, he interprets his time in jail as a preparation for his SS career.8
Höß defines himself alternately as an achiever and a victim. The mentality that emerges from his remarks corresponds with the profile Klaus Theweleit
At the time he wrote his account, Höß had no prospects for the future, which may be why he disclosed facts that other authors kept secret. He presents staggering figures of the mass murders in Auschwitz and details about the prisoners and the killing methods used during the Holocaust. He boastfully admits that he was present at all phases of the killings, including the gassing of Jewish prisoners.11 He occasionally claims to have been powerless to stop the most extreme excesses, which he attributes to the initiative of sadistic Capos (prisoners in supervisory positions).12
Höß tries to differentiate between his professional and private lives when he discloses that the most sacred things in his life were his patriotism as defined by National Socialism and his family.13 As proof for the latter statement, he depicts a few sentimental scenes from his wife’s presumably idyllic life in Auschwitz, but does not mention her by name. He completes the vignettes of peace and harmony with the preposterous statement that even the prisoners idolized his children.14 These sugar-coated fantasies clash with Höß’s callousness in job-related matters, but he is full of self-pity when describing his
Höß’s motivation for writing was, according to his own statements, his fear of inertia while in his prison cell. Other factors probably included the public interest he had attracted and the desire to present himself in a positive light.17 His meticulous descriptions suggest that he took his writing very seriously; he made editorial changes until the day of his execution. The combination of exhibitionist pride and ostensible thoughtfulness in Höß’s memoir provides a perplexing and troubling glimpse into the psyche of an unreformed Nazi.
Marta Hillers’s Anonymous Memoir Eine Frau in Berlin
The memoirs of the SS officer Rudolf Höß and those of the civilian and citizen of the Third Reich Marta Hillers complement each other. Höß’s self-characterization corresponds with the stereotypical Nazi character, and Hillers’s descriptions of herself correlate with female Nazi figures in literature and the marginal position assigned to women in Riefenstahl’s Triumph des Willens.
Höß’s memoir projected the model of the headstrong Nazi male, emphasizing his strength of character and unwavering convictions. In her account of the invasion of Berlin, Marta Hillers assumes quite a different attitude. She tried to avoid exposure by publishing Eine Frau in Berlin (English, 1954; German, 1955) under the pseudonym Anonyma.18 Her self-portrait corroborates the descriptions of female Nazis in the literature examined earlier. Hillers apparently affiliated herself with the regime and its men for opportunistic reasons, but, when faced with the collapse of her world, she quickly adjusted to the changed circumstances. She avoids references to National Socialism and Nazis, and instead focuses on her survival and everyday life in the destroyed city. She seems ready to put the past behind her. The diary introduces the reader to a sphere dominated by women who, in times of crisis, bond and work together for their own and their children’s survival. Their perceived common enemies are the males of the invading Allied forces as well as Germans.
Eine Frau in Berlin covers the period from April 20 to June 22, 1945. Until her death, Hillers (1911–2001) kept her identity as the author of the controversial diary a secret. Cressida Connolly of The Telegraph reports that Anonyma’s
For who should review? The leftist press was bothered by the stereotype of the “evil Russian.” … The right-wing press would have been annoyed by the human depiction of the occupiers as well as the, though not quite voluntary, willingness of German women to sleep with the propagandized Slavic “sub-humans” for protection and food instead of choosing glorified self-sacrifice. The center? The moderate, conservative, Christian press? They were indignant—similar to “Gerd” [her husband]—not over the description of the mass rapes per se, but over the tone in which it was made.20
Having experienced instances of rape by Russian soldiers, Anonyma also reports successful interactions with Russians, including women trading for cigarettes and the exchange of sexual favors in return for food and protection. In the following decades, German readers considered such details scandalous. Anonyma clearly broke a taboo by not keeping the topics of rape and fraternization under wraps. Indeed, as late as the 1990s, Helke Sander’s documentary film BeFreier und BeFreite, Krieg, Vergewaltigungen, Kinder (Liberators Take Liberties. War, Rapes, Children, 1992), which features interviews with wartime rape victims, touched upon a sore spot in Germany memory. Some of Sander’s critics suggested that it was a form of revisionism to discuss the victimization of German women.21 Hillers, similar to other German authors, foregrounds the victim status of German women in contrast to international authors who expose the cruelty of female concentration camp guards. In Sourcis Pour L’Orchestre (Playing for Time, 1976), Auschwitz survivor Fania Fénelon
An English version of Hillers’s diary was first published in 1954 in the United States with the help of journalist Kurt Marek (ps. C.W. Ceram, 1915–1972) under the title A Woman in Berlin. In 1959, the German original appeared in Switzerland, and in 2005 a new edition was issued.24 A German-Polish film production came on the market in 2008 when the petty bourgeois morality of the 1950s was no longer an issue.25 Brad Prager views Hillers’s diary as an account about women’s responses under extreme circumstances, a narrative about “emotions, survival, and even ‘working conditions’ once the war rolls into Berlin.”26
Anonyma captures the chaos faced by women who had been associated with the defeated regime. She becomes aware of her vicarious dual position as a member of the German perpetrator collective and her concurrent role as a victim due to her vulnerability to male-on-female violence and the loss of status that she, like most Germans, experienced. Hereafter, Hillers will be referred to by her authorial mask, Anonyma. Through the use of this pseudonym, she constructed a unique voice, which is unmistakably that of an educated woman in her thirties, who was neither a resistance fighter nor a consummate Nazi.
Distinct from many of the female characters in Nazi-era fiction, Anonyma’s female characters possess agency. Resourceful and pragmatic, they resort to survival strategies that violate peace-time codes of conduct, often involving consensual sexual exchanges. Anonyma thus debunks the Nazi stereotypes of heroic German mothers, chaste wives, and maidens in distress. Her frank description of women’s conduct is accompanied by her revelations of the unheroic demeanor of former Nazi men. Her depictions of demoralized German males at the moment of defeat and of Allied, mostly Russian, occupiers taking full advantage of their victory were considered an assault on German masculinity. To add insult to injury, Anonyma thematizes consensual encounters and even alliances with occupiers acting as the women’s protectors. The criteria for choosing particular male partners, according to Anonyma, included physical strength, position, and rank—the same criteria that Hermynia Zur Mühlen and Anna Seghers considered factors in the partner choices of women under National Socialism.
The diary begins prior to the arrival of the Red Army and ends with the division of Berlin into Allied sectors. In light of the large amount of information available in the twenty-first century, the scope of the diary may seem limited. Readers must also take into consideration that Anonyma excludes second-hand information in addition to the many details unknown to her at the time of writing. The destruction of the German cities, the liberation of the concentration camps, and the fate of world leaders and prominent Nazis were beyond her scope. The prospect that Germans would be held accountable for their war-time activities also seems to escape Anonyma, as did the gravity of the crimes with which the deposed elite and their supporters were to be charged.
The narrative horizon is limited to the basements of ruined houses, air raid shelters, and bombed-out streets—the scenery of her daily life after the civilians were left to fend for themselves. Anonyma describes how she manages, despite food shortages, and how she adjusts to the crowded conditions after the loss of residential space. Often, she writes, she was forced to share her living quarters with complete strangers—people she did not trust, but who were allocated rooms in her and her friends’ dilapidated homes. The struggle for survival leveled class, age, and gender distinctions.27
Anonyma writes all of this with the detachment of a reporter. She depicts her fellow Germans with a keen, unloving eye, taking particular note of their shortcomings.28 Her emotional distance calls to mind Höß’s unsympathetic assessments of his fellow officers. Still, Hillers reveals a sense of solidarity with other Germans. Her attitude vacillates between distance and empathy, but she tries to maintain a certain degree of objectivity commensurate with her role as a chronicler. Especially when revealing her fear of violence, she tries to keep her emotions in check.
Occasionally, she uses ethnic stereotypes reminiscent of Nazi rhetoric. In her characterizations of the Russian invaders, the boundaries between her first-hand observations and ethnocentric clichés become blurred. On the other hand, counter to the Nazis’ doctrine of male superiority, she displays an anti-male bias and casts men, including German men, as potential rapists and exploiters, who base their claims on nothing but brute strength and traditional gender-role expectations. In her opinion, these expectations had remained constant throughout the war and were perpetuated after the collapse of the regime. Considering the content and outlook of Anonyma’s account, it is not surprising that it made for uncomfortable reading even several decades after the demise of the Third Reich.29 The vivid descriptions of wartime brutality and sexual transgression in Eine Frau in Berlin were not apt to soothe the emotionally wounded veterans and their descendants.
Anonyma’s awareness that the Nazi regime had been completely discredited is apparent throughout the text. She carefully avoids expressions that could associate her with National Socialism, but nonetheless, her diction often echoes Nazi speech and compromises her narrative. Her linguistic patterns do not keep pace with her projection of attitudinal changes,30 such as the change in her attitude toward the victors. Counter to Nazi propaganda that had vilified Russian soldiers as pure evil, Anonyma writes about successful exchanges with Russian men. Whereas the mere mention of Russians had struck terror in the hearts of German civilians, Anonyma’s account emerges from this atmosphere of fanaticism. Her portrayal of Russian soldiers is nuanced, and her command of the Russian language obviously increased her effectiveness in communicating with the occupiers. By the same token, her descriptions of German men also deviate from Nazi ideology and the tenet of the master race.
The frequent references to gender indicate that, in Anonyma’s day-to-day reality, gender was a more critical category than nationality. While her personal
Anonyma’s story brings to light collective lapses of memory and paradoxes that are typical of accounts about the final days of the Third Reich. The fact that she lays bare inconsistencies in the collective memory may have added to the discomfort readers experienced with her book. Compared to more straightforward accounts of Germany’s transition from National Socialism into the postwar era, such as some of the East German “conversion” narratives, Eine Frau in Berlin, with its unresolved tensions, continues to be a challenging text.31
Ingeborg Bachmann’s Wartime Diary Kriegstagebuch
The short wartime diary of Ingeborg Bachmann (1926–1973) is exemplary of the way young people viewed the society in which they had grown up at the end of the war. Bachmann’s horizon did not extend beyond the parameters of the Third Reich. After the annexation of Austria in 1938, the Nazis imposed on the Austrian population the same restrictions to which they had subjected the Germans. Manifestations of Nazi rule were pervasive in every form of social expression, including greetings, fashions, and language, so that not even dissenters could avoid Nazi clichés in their speech and demeanor, and the rift between those who lived in the Third Reich and Germans and Austrians in exile continued to widen. After the liberation, it would take only a few sentences to pinpoint a speaker’s Nazi-era experience.
The communication barriers between exiles, Holocaust survivors, and the German and Austrian mainstream continued beyond 1945. The relationship between Ingeborg Bachmann and Austrian refugee and Allied soldier Jack Hamesh (1920–1987) is an example.32 The few documents resulting from the encounter between the young Austrian woman and the British-Jewish-Austrian soldier include Bachmann’s diary, published as Kriegstagebuch (2010), and the letters Hamesh sent her.33 Hamesh had left Austria on a children’s transport to
Hamesh brought to his romantic interlude with Bachmann the language of an outsider struggling to explain his experience as a Jewish exile. His letters reveal that he was aware of Bachmann’s predicament as the sheltered daughter of an Austrian family with Nazi leanings who welcomed a Jew into her home. Clearly, Bachmann could be considered a perpetrator, and, as her diary reveals, she had already come to doubt her parents and the authorities before meeting Hamesh. Her diary is a document of a teenager’s naïveté and mirrors the narrow-mindedness of her Catholic and Nazi middle-class circles in the provincial town of Klagenfurt. Hamesh tries to enlighten Bachmann about international reactions to the German and Austrian recent past, while treating her and her relatives with delicacy. He avoids asking questions about the politics in Bachmann’s home and makes courtesy visits like a prewar suitor. His curiosity about this girl, whom he would have had to consider an enemy only a few months earlier, is undeniable, and he probes into her view about the Nazis when he quizzes her about her time in the BDM, the Bund Deutscher Mädel in der Hitler-Jugend (League of German Girls in the Hitler Youth).35
Some of Bachmann’s relatives had affiliated themselves with the regime, as had her school teachers, whom, as she notes in her diary, she intuitively despises. The school curriculum and her family’s attitudes had mutually reinforced one another, and the extracurricular school activities formed an integral part in a synchronized educational program. Bachmann had become increasingly skeptical of the integrity of the older generation, but she lacked the knowledge to form a cohesive critical perspective.36 Hamesh had encountered Austrian anti-Semitism as a boy, suffered persecution, and lost family members in the Holocaust. In Great Britain, his outlook was influenced by the anti-Nazi sentiments of other exiles and information about Nazi atrocities. Allied media source such as the BBC had shaped his views. In contrast, Austrians could listen to British and American radio stations only at considerable risk.
In postwar Austria, Hamesh’s views about the Third Reich put him at odds with mainstream Austrians, as is obvious from his responses to the clearly ill-informed Bachmann. Although she expresses her distate for Nazi activities, she lacked the intellectual defenses to refute the dominant ideology, especially in consideration of her apparent affection for her family. Gender may also have factored into her ignorance of political matters; girls were even less expected than boys to think in political terms. Hamesh, in turn, insists on providing
Bachmann, as one diary entry suggests, satisfied a rebellious impulse directed against adults by dating “the Jew.”37 She appears to have been motivated by her desire to learn about a world from which she had been cut off, and to gather evidence against the authority she disdained. Her relationship with Hamesh, who represented the enemy to the people in her environment, was an expression of her rebellion. No doubt, she instrumentalized him in her desire to transform herself. To Hamesh, Bachmann must have been a symbolic figure signifying an idyllic Austria, which the Holocaust had made inaccessible to him. Eventually, he continued on to Germany, from where he sent Bachmann several typed letters, and later relocated to Tel Aviv.
Through Bachmann, Hamesh seems to have tried to recapture a sense of his lost youth, and to effect a reconciliation with Austria, which had become enemy territory, even though he still spoke German. His conflict becomes manifest after the escapist affair. In a letter from Germany, he mentions the fascist mentality that is still prevailing in Austria as his reason not to return.38 His nostalgia had prompted him to seek out Bachmann, even though her family’s viewpoints were no secret to him. The romantic liaison seems to have made him realize that a future among former Nazis was out of the question for him. Nonetheless, his continued effort to disclose his feelings to the daughter of Nazis suggests a longing for healing.39 At the same time, Hamesh expresses a lack of confidence in Bachmann. He questions their relationship, which he surmises may have been nothing more than „eine zufällige Episode.“40
Reflections such as these interrupt the superficial harmony between two unequal partners and call for a closer look at the gulf separating Hamesh, who asserts that he stands „auf Ruinen ohne Heim ohne Eltern ohne Verwandte, ohne Heimat, ohne Hoffnung und das Schrecklichste ohne Zukunft“41 and Bachmann, who eventually leaves Klagenfurt to escape the everyday fascism in her home-town environment.42 For Bachmann, the Jewish Englishman represented a resource in her endeavor to disengage from the burden of the past. She seems to have inquired about his life in greater detail than he was willing
The interlude between Bachmann and Hamesh exemplifies the “Negative Symbiosis” which, according to Dan Diner, at once connected and separated German and Jewish post-Shoah memory. Bachmann’s later relationships with exiles and survivors such as Paul Celan and Ilse Aichinger, and her admiration for Jean Améry confirm Diner’s thesis that the antagonistic bond between the victims and the perpetrator collective increased in intensity over time.44 Bachmann, who began her career as a writer in Austria, where former Nazis held positions of power, needed the emotional intensity in her relationship with Hamesh to gather momentum and develop an informed critical stance towards the past. Once she had grasped the extent to which the past had shaped post-Shoah German society, she distanced herself from the Nazi legacy and eventually moved to Rome.
Bachmann’s “critical moment” was facilitated by her relationship with Hamesh, which was frowned upon in Klagenfurth. Hamesh encouraged her to face up to her misconceptions and develop empathy for Holocaust survivors and exiles. The psychologists Alexander and Margarete Mitscherlich, in their collection of essays Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern (The Inability to Mourn, 1967), determined that the wounds of the past could not heal without a fundamental examination and emotional processing.45 Bachmann’s development in the postwar period and her later literary message largely confirms the Mitscherlichs’ analysis.
Writing about Nazis—A Postwar Dilemma
The military man had been an iconic figure in German literature. The figures of soldiers and officers dominated literature after the Second World War. All of German society had been implicated in the so-called “total war.” Virtually every family had members who were soldiers, and the war effort had placed men in uniform at the forefront of Nazi society. The SS, classified as a criminal organization after the war, had been deployed alongside the German Wehrmacht, and even women had participated in the war effort, for example, as “flak” helpers
Authors who had begun writing in the Weimar Republic generally favored traditional genres and mediated events of the Nazi era through exceptional characters, including high-ranking Nazi officers. These characters’ conflicts typically occasioned an exploration of Nazi society and its more depraved representatives, suggesting that not all Germans, not even all Nazis, had been involved in the criminal activities of the regime. Neither entirely good nor entirely evil, literary Nazi heroes were depicted as victims of their moral scruples that prevented them from supporting the Nazi state without reservations. Typically, their lukewarm attitude is shown to cost them their position and, ultimately, their life. The drama of Carl Zuckmayer, Des Teufels General, places the downfall of the ambiguous protagonist on a par with the tragic heroes of Goethe or Schiller.
Younger postwar writers were interested in the predicament of common soldiers as puppets in a criminal regime that had betrayed them. These works, usually by veterans, tend to cast soldier-protagonists as victims among victims. Examples of these works include the play Draußen vor der Tür (The Man Outside, 1946) by Wolfgang Borchert and the narrative Der Zug war pünktlich (The Train was on Time, 1949) by Heinrich Böll. The observations about exculpatory tendencies in the works of Borchert and Böll made here call for a clarification of these authors’ positions in the Third Reich. There is no comparison between conscripted soldiers such as Borchert (born 1921) and Böll (born 1917), draftees into the Nazi military at a relatively young age, and high-ranking Nazis such as Rudolf Höβ, who had worked for the Nazi movement since the 1920s. The letters and notes of the younger authors indicate reservations about the Nazi regime that were foreign to Höβ until the very end.47 However, the younger men
A comparison with an even younger German author, Günter Grass (born 1927), will help to put Böll’s authorial position into perspective. Grass had joined the Hitler Youth and later served in the SS in 1944. His career path suggests a commitment to the Nazi regime. After the war, Grass concealed his SS-membership for decades, and, as an articulate Social Democrat, he became a moral authority in West Germany. In 2006, his autobiography Beim Häuten der Zwiebel (Peeling the Onion, 2006) was published, and he finally broke his silence, much to the consternation of the German public.48 The fact that Grass, like Böll, had received the highest honors, including the Nobel Prize, made his revelations especially painful. Borchert and Böll were impacted by the Nazi ideology in the course of their education in the Third Reich and their service in the Nazi military, but they did not participate in Nazi organizations to the same degree as Grass. They both constructed literary characters to help them uncover the effects of Nazi indoctrination and the damage resulting from the experience of the war. Their figures reveal the authors’ intimate knowledge of Nazi structures, Nazi jargon, and army slang. While most of their Nazi characters are cast in a negative light, these works also include positive, redeemable Nazi figures, with whom the authors seem to identify.
Carl Zuckmayer’s Drama Des Teufels General
In his well-known drama Des Teufels General (1946), exile writer Carl Zuckmayer (1896–1977) introduced as his protagonist a member of the Nazi elite, Luftwaffe
The case of Zuckmayer’s general proposes that it is possible to be a traditional tragic hero and also a member of the Nazi elite. This is an interesting proposition in the work of an already accomplished dramatist, whose plays had been banned from German stages in 1933 and who had fled to the United States in 1939. Still, Zuckmayer had friends among the Nazis, including the unnamed fighter to whom he initially dedicated his play, which was first drafted in 1942, but then recast and first performed in 1946.50 In his rather traditional three-act-tragedy, Zuckmayer showcases the crème de la crème of Nazi Germany: officers, politicians, aristocrats, and celebrities. Controversies involving the character of Harras ensued immediately, but the frequent performances of Des Teufels General attest to continued interest in the play. Following Zuckmayer’s insinuations, Anthony Waine suggests that the conduct Zuckmayer ascribes to the Nazi leadership—boisterous patriotism and masculine bravado—captures the zeitgeist of a broader “culture of masculinity.”51 Stephen Brockman stresses the ambivalence of the Harras figure, which is set apart from the
The model for Harras was the star pilot Ernst Udet, who had joined the Nazi Party in 1933. He enjoyed the support of Hermann Göring, who provided him with state-of-the-art airplanes for research and propaganda purposes. Udet started out as a lieutenant colonel in the Luftwaffe, the Nazi air force, and had a brilliant career. However, like other prominent officers, including Rommel, he later fell out of favor when he was blamed for military setbacks. Rather than face public censure and humiliation, Udet put a bullet in his head in 1941. The German media reported his suicide as an accident.54
Zuckmayer presents a reconfigured protagonist to better fit the pattern of a hero; Harras was obviously not intended as a mirror-image of Udet. Harras, like Udet, is a flying ace but rather than shooting himself, he undertakes a spectacular suicide mission in his plane as an act of quasi-atonement. There is no mention of a drunken display of the kind that supposedly precipitated Udet’s death. Zuckmayer’s Harras draws admiration for his star appeal and a certain degree of integrity places him at odds with the regime he serves. His romantic personal traits co-mingling with dogged determination in the professional sphere call to mind not only other conflicted hero figures of German literature but also Nazi autobiographers like Hitler and Höβ, who in their accounts underscore their staunch independence and rebelliousness. Harras seems to be high-minded until he becomes embroiled in petty politics for the sake of his passion: flying. Only the Nazi leadership can make the most advanced airplanes available to him, which means that he has to compromise his ideals, including his regard for his friends and associates. Unsurprisingly, Zuckmayer attributes to his hero a special appeal to women, but his male friends also appreciate his joie de vivre and loyalty. Harras shares certain character traits with Klaus Mann’s protagonist. Like Hendrik Höfgen, Harras yearns for the limelight, and as a result compromises dissenters among his friends to whom he wants
Des Teufels General revolves around the question as to whether it was possible to belong to the Nazi elite without being a real Nazi. Zuckmayer uses various strategies to communicate Harras’s valor: at times, he has Harras voice his disenchantment with the Third Reich, just as the historical model, Ernst Udet, might have done, despite or precisely because he was a member of the Nazi Party. However, an elite fighter pilot’s loyalty would rarely be questioned. Until Harras faces arrest, he believes himself to be above the law and uses the transgressive language that was common in the elite units. Unlike Udet, though, Harras refuses to join the Party and openly contradicts SS officers and party officials. His frequent refusal to follow orders makes him prone to conflict, and his arrogance causes him to ignore the perceptions others have of him. However, none of his statements amount to real resistance.
Harras’s hubris and his child-like passion for flying constitute his tragic flaws. Although his arrogance differs from the type of vulgar bullying in which Nazi leadership workshops trained the SS, Harras observes the rituals of dominance associated with the landed gentry. His demeanor vacillates between smooth urbanity and a type of posturing found among aristocratic swashbucklers. German film star Curd Jürgens, who was usually cast as the worldly and reckless hero, was ideal for the role of Harras in Fritz Käutner’s film, fitting Zuckmayer’s stage direction: „Er ist in grosser Galauniform, aber in Haltung und Benehmen leger, eher etwas salopp. Das geleerte Glas hält er noch in der Hand, eine Zigarette hängt im Mundwinkel. Sein kluges, trotz gelichteter Haare noch jugendliches, ja jungenhaftes Gesicht—er mag nicht älter als fünfundvierzig sein … scheint von einer kaum bemerkbaren nervösen Spannung erfüllt.“55
For a compelling rendering of a Nazi insider who is at once a dissident and victim, Zuckmayer needed to make the point that Harras was genuinely
Keenly aware of the ongoing attacks on the nuclear family and the middle class, Harras ridicules the absence of decorum in Nazi society, noting the lack of morals in the Hitler Youth: „Nämlich bei der Hitlerjugend verlobt man sich nicht mehr, das hält zu lange auf.“57 Indeed, Cocks writes that even the medical establishment had loosened the standards regulating sex, just as they had with regard to alcohol, citing a shift toward “problem-oriented discourse and practice concerning the increased sexual activity as a result of war and the mobilization for war.”58 Zuckmayer does not intend for Harras to seem prudish, nor appear to be a lecher and highlights his refusal of the sexual advances of Waltraud von Mohrungen. With a kind of old-fashioned gallantry, he assumes the aura of a traditional ladies’ man while his use of vulgarisms, on the other hand, attests to his masculine prowess and marks him as a disillusioned war hero.
The degree to which Harras has internalized Nazi ideology is rendered apparent by his verbal expression. For example, he refers to nationalities in the singular—speaking of “der Russe” instead of “die Russen,”59 and he collectives Jewish individuals as “der Jud” (“the Jew” in the singular).60 Another example is his uncritical use of Nazi terms such as “alte Kämpfer” (old fighter), in
The character of Waltraud von Mohrungen is designed to reveal the negative effects of Nazi indoctrination on women. In her attitudes, she appears to be a direct correlation to the Nazi male. Nazi tenets rule her thinking and decisions; for example, she breaks her engagement to a respected officer on the basis of his presumably flawed racial background.62 Her predilection for athletic bodies and choreographed gymnastics seems informed by the aesthetics expressed in Riefenstahl’s Olympia (1938), a documentary film about the Olympic Games in Berlin.63 Evoking the “Nordic” male of Günther’s Rassenkunde, Waltraud praises hard male bodies, „breite Schultern, schmale Hüften, Langschädel,“64 and raves about a women’s sports program, where the participants are almost nude. „Lauter stramme Mädels, mit nicht als Schamhöschen bekleidet.“65 Waltraud’s areas of expertise include racial politics, selective breeding, and sexual hygiene. Her current research project deals with the function of pain as a character-building factor in the life of a nation.66 Waltraud regards humanitarian concerns as misguided and dreams instead of training courses to steel mind and body. Compared to a fanatic like her, Harras harbors no prejudices to speak of. His dismissive remarks about genealogical research
Harras’s allure includes his boyish charm, which distinguishes him from the functionaries and makes for unfailing audience appeal. Within the play, though, it is precisely this popular allure that renders him vulnerable. Cast as a genuine patriot, he insists on remaining in Germany, where he is at risk. His presumably noble decision distinguishes him from other Germans who have fled the Fatherland. The implied criticism also applies to Jews in exile, where—according to Harras’s paramour Diddo—they lead a life of comfort while other Germans suffer.69 These anti-Semitic assumptions must be interpreted as a nod to German postwar audiences who held this opinion. Diddo’s unrealistic vision of one day moving to New York reinforces the notion of the joys of exile, which is surpassed by Harras’s insensitive remark that they both should become honorary Jews: „Vielleicht werden wir noch mal Ehrenjuden—wir beide.“70 Ignorant of the difficulties involved in securing the visas and the means required to immigrate, the postwar public may have considered Harras’s decision to stay in Germany an option that was actually available, and an honorable choice that also validated the majority experience. Harras pays the price for his old-time patriotism when he falls prey to the “real” Nazis.
Zuckmayer’s scenario is flawed by incongruities that arise at the outset. For one, the implied distinction between German patriots and Nazis remains unconvincing, as do the superficial conversations about race and the Jewish experience in light of historical facts. Des Teufels General alludes to anti-Semitism, but does not take into consideration that at the time of Udet’s suicide in November of 1941, the “Final Solution” was a foregone conclusion. At least Zuckmayer in 1946 would have known about the Wannsee Conference, where the genocide was announced. In Zuckmayer’s play of 1946, Harras minimizes the threat to the Jewish population, and his remarks about Jewish identity place him squarely in the Nazi camp. His disparaging comments about
To flesh out the discord among high-ranking Nazis, Zuckmayer provides insight into the lives of dissenters and the working class.71 The plot lines suggest that the norms of solidarity and comradeship still hold sway for this set of characters, even though the risks resisters take are high—the practices of Schutzhaft (protective custody) and torture are known in Harras’s circle. Within this wider spectrum, Harras represents a hero at the turning point. Eventually, he overcomes his moral paralysis72. He is shown in several encounters with characters who appeal to his conscience. The most significant meeting is with the widow of a friend, who asserts that her husband was murdered, although his death was ruled “accidental.” Harras’s remorse regarding withholding his suspicions about his friend’s death is a precipitating factor in his own death by suicide.73 Harras’s kamikaze flight derives from his decision that death is preferable over continued service in the Nazi air force. Through his suicide, Harras supposedly achieves redemption. Through this extreme decision, Zuckmayer’s hero tries to convince himself, and the German audience, that he could rise to the highest ranks of the Nazi hierarchy without actually being a Nazi.
Wolfgang Borchert’s Play Drauβen vor der Tür
In the play Draußen vor der Tür (1947), author and playwright Wolfgang Borchert (1921–1947) tried to establish that the returning veteran Beckmann, through his suffering and death, was a victim.74 Beckmann, wounded and demoralized, confronts former Nazis who successfully adjust to postwar reality. The characters of the Colonel, the Cabaret Director, and his former neighbor Frau Kramer show no empathy with the young veteran in his old uniform and combat spectacles, and presumably contribute to his decision to try suicide for a second time. Without information about Beckmann’s wartime deployment,
Drauβen vor der Tür is set among ordinary Germans in Hamburg, the author’s hometown, and has an autobiographical flavor. The damage to life under National Socialism is evident in Borchert’s biography. Borchert met the requirements of the regime as much as necessary, but occasionally his disaffection surfaced. He was not affiliated with any resistance organization and submitted to compulsory conscription in the army. He was deployed in Eastern Europe and wounded. He contracted diphtheria and was accused of self-mutilation.75 The charge was dismissed, but he remained in custody for criticizing the regime. After his release from active duty, he worked as a cabaret artist. In a stage act, he parodied Culture Minister Joseph Göbbels, and was again incarcerated. He then was deployed to the Western front and taken prisoner by the French. His German prison documents proved his prior opposition to the regime, and he was released. Back in Hamburg, he worked at the Schauspielhaus until his death in 1947.76
Heinrich Böll, likewise a veteran and part of the German perpetrator collective, rose to the level of a moral authority in West Germany in the 1950s and 1960s. In his afterword to Drauβen vor der Tür, he compares Borchert’s personal non-conformism unfavorably to the activism of organized resistance fighters.77 Both authors wrote about German suffering during and after the war, the suffering of the perpetrators, as Laurel Cohen-Pfister notes in her article on collective memory. Böll opines that characterizing Borchert as a Nazi opponent solely on the basis of his Göbbels parody is tantamount to elevating a personal antipathy to the level of political opposition. Nonetheless, Böll has to concede that resisters who engaged in public opposition, as did the Scholl siblings of the White Rose,78 lost their lives to little avail.
In the afterword, Böll draws attention to his own inactivity during the war. His letters from different fronts reveal discomfort and doubt about a German victory and trepidations about a likely defeat. Critics base their notions of Böll’s dissidence on Böll’s later, more resolute, literary assessments after a period of silence.79 Seeing the devastation of German society at the end of the war, young authors called for a new beginning, a tabula rasa, since neither the humanist educational system nor German philosophy had prevented
Draußen vor der Tür shows an obvious affinity with Faust, Goethe’s cosmic drama about guilt and redemption. In Drauβen vor der Tür, Borchert inscribes himself in the classical tradition. The prelude of the play features the allegorical figures of God and Death. Death is endowed with satanic traits and is reminiscent of Goethe’s Mephisto. God, neither omniscient nor all-powerful, is too old and weak to intervene. All he can do is bewail his children. The injection of army jargon into the play further subverts the classical model by insinuating that the language of high culture is inappropriate in the defeated Germany. Borchert reduces Goethe’s high drama about the struggle between God and Satan to a struggle for survival. Goethe’s Faust is partially redeemed, but the pleas of Borchert’s presumably more harmless returning soldier remain unanswered. Without a divine presence to appeal to, his condition is reminiscent of Heidegger’s concept of man being thrown into an indifferent world.82
The play appeals to a wide range of postwar audiences by voicing despair after Germany’s defeat without assigning blame. The theme of collective suffering neutralizes the expectation of the international community that Germans take responsibility for the war crimes they committed. Drauβen vor der Tür, in its vagueness, invites multiple readings, some palatable to former Nazis, others implying a universalizing “modern” Existentialist message. A specific political trajectory is conspicuously absent. The pervasive misery seems to imply that the fall of the Third Reich—the only Germany that the author’s generation had known—marked the end of the German tradition in its entirety. In Borchert’s
Perpetuating the familiar gender model, Borchert does not consider female agency when constructing his characters, but rather presents Nazi clichés and army jargon, using terms like the diminutive “Mädchen” for a married woman, which is correctly “Frau.”83 Phantasies of the commodification of women inform assumptions made in the play about male dominance and female passivity. Borchert obliquely addresses the crisis of German masculinity through his wounded hero, who was too young to have been in a position of responsibility. Thus, he is emblematic of a misled and doomed generation robbed of their opportunities. The allusions to Siberia elicit the horror of Russian POW camps, but no mention is made of atrocities the German military committed. The most troublesome emotional burden for Beckmann is his memory of a group of men of whom he was in charge and who were killed on his watch. No similar scruples arise with regard to enemy soldiers or civilians he and his unit may have killed.
While Beckmann does consider other people and the future of Germany, his narcissist anguish increases with every new misfortune he encounters; rejection by other Germans; separation from his new girlfriend, and his parents’ suicide. Frau Kramer, a neighbor, tells him about the death of his parents in an especially hurtful way, emphasizing their Nazi affiliation and anti-Semitism. By inserting this vulgar figure of an anti-Nazi, Borchert comes close to exonerating the old Beckmanns by comparison. The method they chose for suicide, cooking gas, might even insinuate a parallel to the Nazi gas chambers. Within the play, which is synchronous with the Nuremberg Trials and debates about the genocide, the Kramer-episode minimizes German guilt by suggesting that not only Jews but also Germans died by gassing. Ultimately, the episode trivializes the Holocaust and disparages antifascists. It even implies that Beckmann’s father, who was stripped of his position and his pension after the war, had atoned for his fanatical anti-Semitism before his suicide. By extension, whatever young Beckmann may have done, he is exonerated by his presumed victim status. The characters that cause Beckmann the most discomfort are those who are coming to terms with life in the a postwar era while he prefers suicide over readjustment.
Borchert’s apolitical scenery successfully targeted postwar audiences who were seeking a respite from reality. Drauβen vor der Tür, first performed one day after Borchert’s death, earned the author immediate recognition as the
Drauβen vor der Tür insinuates that the end of the war, rather than the Nazi regime, eroded the social fabric. In his gas mask goggles and fatigues, Beckmann’s appearance is the same as during the war, but to his dismay everything around him has changed. The German defeat has transformed even the universe where Death gorges himself. No redeemer is in sight, except, perhaps, the long-suffering veteran. Beckmann bases his claims of privileged insight on his wartime and near-death experiences. When at the opening of the play he returns from the dead after his first suicide attempt, he comes endowed with prophetic insight that raises him above the level of the mundane debates about Nazi trials or collective guilt.85 On his short path through life, this average “little man” becomes the embodiment of German heroism, even in defeat.86
The popularity of Drauβen vor der Tür made the play a staple in German school syllabi. In his reflections on the postwar writers’ association Gruppe 47, Heinz Ludwig Arnold notes that, in the early publications of the group, mainstream Germans were cast as the primary victims of National Socialism. He asserts that many authors attributed a victim status to former Nazis, in blatant disregard of the historical facts:
Erst spät geriet in den Blick, dass sich die Autoren der Gruppe zwar viel mit Krieg und Nachkrieg beschäftigt hatten, dass aber in den 1950er Jahren die Vernichtung der europäischen Juden kein Thema für sie war, dass sich die Kriegsteilnehmer kaum selbstkritisch mit ihrer Rolle in Krieg und ‚Drittem Reich‘ auseinander setzten und dass die Gruppe mit den aus dem Exil heimgekehrten Schriftstellern Probleme hatte.87
The avoidance of the terms Nazi or National Socialist in the play transposes the postwar problematic into an ahistoric arena away from politics. Beckmann claims the moral high ground by distancing himself from the Colonel and the mercenary cabaret director. The Allied occupying forces are excluded from Borchert’s scope, but their presence is manifest in the new commercialism. This constellation suggests that during the Third Reich, Germans were honest people, and blames a cheapening of values on Allied influence. Beckmann, however, is a loyalist until his death.89 His refusal to start anew amounts to a belated confirmation of the all-or-nothing ethos propagated by the Nazis.90
The trajectory of Drauβen vor der Tür suggests that Germans suffered a historic injustice that eclipses their entanglement with National Socialism. By discrediting antifascist points of view, Borchert casts aspersion at denazification and reeducation programs. Ironically, by using the term “denazification” in conjunction with the suicide of Beckmann’s parents, the only antifascist in the play, Mrs. Kramer, is positioned to discredit Allied reforms: „Entnazifiziert.
Heinrich Böll’s Narrative Der Zug war pünktlich
In Heinrich Böll’s (1917–1985) narrative Der Zug war pünktlich (The Train was on Time, 1949), the suffering of soldiers in the Nazi military is presented in a strategy of placing the German armies and their victims on the same level. Böll isolates the soldiers’ activities from the historical context and thus deflects attention away from their role in different theaters of war.92 Heinrich Böll, a war veteran, often explored the mindset of Nazi soldiers at the time of defeat. He depicts a demoralized military and soldiers, who were too young for the leadership positions they were assigned. His main figures are apolitical draftees, who go on their tours of duty without special enthusiasm. His disillusioned narrators are partial to these characters and cast them as the helpless victims of a corrupt regime.
Robert C. Conard, in his study Understanding Heinrich Böll, notes that Böll’s outlook was shaped by the emergent anti-authoritarian lifestyle of the interwar period,93 and Renata Kocfeldová maintains that Böll’s father had imparted to his son an anti-militaristic ethos.94 In the 1930s, Böll avoided joining the Hitler Youth and the Nazi Labor service, and as a consequence was excluded from university study. Like his heroes, he was drafted into the military and from 1939 to 1945 served as a front-line soldier. Considering that Böll was a devout Catholic, it seems incongruent that his wedding photo of 1942 shows him in his military uniform, which suggests a more than casual affinity for the military. Not surprisingly, especially after his deployment to France and Russia in 1942 and 1943, he grew increasingly wary of the war and attempted to desert. Ultimately, he was taken prisoner by the U.S. Armed Forces.
In his fiction, Böll does not tire of expressing disdain for ranking officers and privileged civilians, who had supported the Nazi regime and the war. Still, his wartime correspondence contains a far less streamlined trajectory. Here, Böll vacillates between his hopes for a German victory and dread for what such victory might entail.95 Critic Peter Lange mentions “irritierende Äußerungen”96 that seem to be incongruent with the existing Böll image and suggest that the young Böll was a man of contradictions in search of an ethical foundation.
In Der Zug war pünktlich, one of only a few postwar publications that mention Nazi war crimes and the Holocaust, the ideological fluctuations in the letters seem to have been overcome. The original title, Zwischen Lemberg und Czernowitz (Between Lvov and Czernovice), situates the plot in Galicia, the epicenter of the genocide. The timeframe, 1943, points to the battle of Stalingrad, which began in July 1942 and resulted in the devastating defeat of February 1943, which ended the German prospects for victory. Böll’s implied subtext thus juxtaposes the Holocaust and the defeat of the sixth German Army, which makes Der Zug war pünktlich a tale of crime and punishment—the beginning of the Nazi genocide in Poland precedes the decisive German defeat.
The protagonist and narrator of Der Zug war pünktlich is the ordinary German soldier Andreas. Andreas returns from furlough to be sent to the Eastern front as cannon fodder. The Catholic prayers he recites, even though he serves in the Nazi military, establish a religious frame of reference marking Andreas as a silent dissenter. The prayers evoke a sense of divine justice that transcends the comprehension of the deeply compromised and yet empathetically drawn Nazi soldiers. Böll’s characters include SS men, Gestapo, high-ranking officers, and Nazi Party members. All of these men seem warped, but a sense of camaraderie distinguishes the Wehrmacht soldiers from the “real” Nazis, the SS: „Wieder SS,“ says a soldier disdainfully, suggesting that the Nazi special units intrude upon the decent Wehrmacht soldiers.97
The narrator identifies with the regular military, soldiers and lower-ranking officers, and against the “Nazis,” as a remark about a young lieutenant reveals: „dem die Leutnantsschulterstücke schwer auf den Schultern lagen, sehr schwer.“98 The soldiers and the lieutenant alike are victims—victims among victims. He looks pathetic, and Andreas explains that this officer, like himself,
The title phrase “Der Zug war pünktlich” (The Train was on Time) serves as a leitmotif. It alludes to the punctuality ascribed to the Germans as a national trait and to fate, which is inescapably “on time.” The motif suggests that Böll was cognizant of the role of trains in the business of war and the logistics of the Holocaust, which was the focus of Raul Hilberg’s study The Destruction of the European Jews (1961).100 Andreas senses that he will die between Lemberg (Lvov, Poland) and Czernowitz (Chernivtsi, Ukraine). Gradually, his presentiment becomes a certainty: he is convinced that he will die in Strij (Stryi), a Jewish shtetl at the Polish/Ukrainian border, where the Germans had erected a ghetto and in 1942 deported the Jewish population to the death camp of Belzec. In 1943, the Jewish community of Strij was completely wiped out.101 Böll’s narrator does not provide information about the massacres in Strij and the deportations, but he is obsessed with the site in the manner a criminal may be drawn to the scene of his crime. Andreas is obviously aware of the genocide, as his prayers for the Jews of Galicia reveal:
Komm Heiliger Geist; noch einmal das Credo, weil es so wunderbar vollständig ist; dann die Karfreitagsfürbitten, weil sie so wunderbar umfassend sind, auch für die ungläubigen Juden. Dabei denkt er an Czernowitz und er betet besonders für die Czernowitzer Juden und für die Lemberger Juden, und in Stanislau sind auch sicher Juden, und in Kolomea … dann noch einmal ein Vaterunser, und dann ein eigenes Gebet; es läßt sich wunderbar beten neben den schweigenden beiden.102
Like most of Böll’s protagonists, Andreas is no hero. He reluctantly boards the train he is ordered to take, afraid of what lies ahead. He even contemplates suicide, as he admits to the Chaplain who is standing by as the train leaves the station:
Ich kann mich ja unter die Räder schmeißen wollen … ich kann ja fahnenflüchtig werden … wie? Ich will nicht sterben, das ist das Furchtbare, daß ich nicht sterben will … Sei still! Ich steig schon ein, irgendwo ist immer Platz.103
Andreas is aware of the misery the German soldiers inflict upon the countries they invade and the hatred they evoke, for example, in France. He remembers the contempt with which French citizens treated them: „Da stand ein französischer Kleinbürger mit seiner Pfeife im Mund, und der ganze bleierne französische Spießerspott war in seiner Augen, und dieser Mann wußte nichts.“104
Such passages reveal how the Germans are viewed by the conquered populations, who do not even know the extent of the war crimes. As a German insider, Andreas is much better informed. The French civilians have “only” been subjected to plundering and vandalism by Nazi troops. „Da die Vitrine. Haben die Deutschen zerschmissen. Und den Teppich mit Zigarettenstummeln verbrannt und auf der Couch haben sie mit ihren Huren gepennt, es war alles versaut.“105 On the other hand, Andreas’s insider perspective shows the German soldiers up close: unkempt, demoralized, and in pain. One staff sergeant, Willi, is traumatized about having to leave his wife, whom he found in
Keine Freude hab ich mehr gehabt und keine kann ich mehr finden. Ich habe Angst, eine Frau anzusehen. Hingedämmert und geheult habe ich zu Hause die ganze Zeit wie ein schwachsinniges Kind, und meine Mutter hat gedacht, ich hätte eine furchtbare Krankheit. Aber ich hab’s ihr doch nicht sagen können, das kann man keinem Menschen sagen.108
Andreas conforms neither to the image of the German soldier as described by the occupied population nor to the propagandistic representation of heroic soldiers in the Nazi media. He, like his comrades, is a broken man, and as such evokes sympathy.
Andreas depicts the German military culture as fundamentally corrupt. Morale can only be maintained by numbing the senses: drinking, gambling, smoking, and sex serve as coping mechanisms even if basic needs are not met, as indicated by Andreas’s hunger attacks.109 Based on their appearance, the soldiers have become mere shadows of their civilian selves: „Der Unrasierte ist ganz still. Er ist fast ohne Leben. Er hat die ganze Nacht nicht schlafen können; er ist erloschen, und seine Augen sind wie blinde Spiegel, seine Wangen sind gelb und eingesunken, und das Unrasiertsein ist jetzt schon ein Bart.“110 The lack of military standards results from the loss of soldiers and prompts rapid
Böll also uncovers the sentimentality of the Nazi military and Third Reich popular culture. The proliferation of escapist songs and films that subliminally supported the war effort demonstrate the penchant for trite sentimentalism. On the other hand, the maudlin tunes sung by Lale Andersen, Hans Albers, and Zarah Leander served as a cover for the Nazis’ inhumanity toward perceived enemies inside and outside Germany.112 The issue of make-believe romance arises in Der Zug war pünktlich in the episode of the prostitute and spy Olina, who makes fun of her dealings with a German general. Even though she admits that she extracted information from her client during their trysts, Andreas still considers her affectionate behavior toward him to be genuine trust.
The loss of personal identity is an important element in the observations about the Nazi military mentality. Any man can seemingly assume any function provided he acts correctly. While shining one’s boots translates into a renewed interest in life, physical neglect is a sign of mental disintegration. Being assigned a specific task increases an individual’s sense of self-worth. For example, unexpected orders from an SS man give one of the common soldiers a sense of direction and draw him out of his lethargy.113 Even as banal a task as standing guard duty is a psychological boost. By uncovering these dynamics, Böll sheds light upon the mechanics of dominance and submission. Everyone, the narrative suggests, has the potential of becoming a Nazi soldier.
Eventually, Andreas’s own values come to light. His attachment to Germany constitutes a positive element: „Nie mehr werde ich Deutschland sehen, Deutschland ist weg. Der Zug hat Deutschland verlassen während ich schlief … da war die Grenze, und der Zug ist kaltblütig darüber gefahren.“114 His affection for Olina, to whom he tells his life-story, is also intended to evoke sympathy. The romanticized encounter between the soldier and the prostitute in a front-line brothel the night before his fatal car crash personalizes the sex exchange
Engaging in the same activities as his comrades, Andreas construes an emotional framework to justify himself. His yearning for authentic emotions seems to be a pattern that also applies to his professed love for a French woman, whom he saw for only a split second: „Nur eine Zehntelsekunde habe ich die einzig Geliebte sehen dürfen, die vielleicht nur ein Spuk war.“115 The memory of the beautiful woman helps him to ignore the war. Instead of taking note of the here-and-now, he keeps wondering, „welche Stirn zu diesen Augen gehörte, welcher Mund, und welche Brust und welche Hände? Ach, wäre es zuviel gewesen, wenn ich hätte erfahren dürfen, welches Herz dazugehörte, ein Mädchenherz vielleicht.“116
The encounter of Andreas and Olina is similarly embellished and leads the readers to believe that there is a give-and-take between the prostitute and the Nazi soldier. The episode with the sex-worker is make-believe designed to satisfy a German invader’s fantasy of a Polish woman. Information that might interfere with the atmosphere of mutual understanding is suppressed.117 Olina’s heartbreaking memories alongside the German soldier’s tale of woe suggests a parallel between the conquered Poles and the German aggressors, classifying both of them as victims of the war. A sergeant’s apparent alcoholism serves the same end, as a signal of the cruelty of war, which causes mental and physical deterioration.118 Even the “hysterical” officers, who are mentioned in passing, display signs of emotional disturbance when they frantically order the soldiers around and look more like victims than victors.119
Ultimately, Der Zug war pünktlich obscures the brutality of the war and atrocities committed by the soldiers. The events leading up to Andreas’s death serve to engage the reader emotionally without having to describe human beings in the war-torn territories. Instead, Andreas only lists the names of Polish and Ukrainian towns. The practice of alluding to killing sites is also evident in the abstract prose of Nazi veterans, who report insider information to an
Der Zug war pünktlich leaves no doubt about the author’s awareness of atrocities committed by ordinary soldiers and establishes a connection between their demoralization and participation in genocide. It is interesting to note that the stress experienced by the SS death squads during mass shootings was the Nazis’ rationale for establishing gas chambers that would avoid the “bloodbaths.”123 Böll takes up the narrative of soldiers tired from killing and tries to elicit sympathy for them. This strategy is especially effective in the case of Andreas, a somewhat naïve but not fundamentally evil narrator. Despite his deployments to the Eastern front, he has preserved his religious values and a certain respect for humanity. None of this prevents him, however, from being fully involved in the military machinery.
The way Andreas relates to non-Germans, especially women, is particularly problematic. On one hand, he treats them as a source of comfort, while on the other hand he claims superiority over them as a male and a soldier. Not without self-pity, he depicts the German soldiers as the pawns of absent power brokers and still accords them heroic greatness because every day they face death. Except for the religious dimensions in Böll, there are striking analogies between the soldier figures in Der Zug war pünktlich and Borchert’s Drauβen vor der Tür. The protagonists of both authors conform to the paradigm of unschuldige Täter (innocent perpetrators) coined by Ruth Wodak, Peter Nowak, and Johanna Pelikan.124 The German soldier as a sacrificial lamb is a recurring motif in Böll’s fiction. By keeping the impressions of war as the epitome of barbarism and chaos abstract, he avoids specificity, and dwells on emotional details that illustrate the suffering experienced by average soldiers. The following lines from the prose narrative “Nicht nur zur Weihnachtszeit” (“Christmas
In den Jahren 1939 bis 1945 hatten wir Krieg. Im Krieg wird gesungen, geschossen, geredet, gekämpft, gehungert und gestorben—und es werden Bomben geschmissen—lauter unerfreuliche Dinge, mit deren Erwähnung ich meine Zeitgenossen in keiner Weise langweilen will.125
Ilse Aichinger’s Novel Die gröβere Hoffnung
The family constellations in the novel Die größere Hoffnung (Herod’s Children, 1948) by Vienna-born postwar author Ilse Aichinger (1921–2016), a survivor of racial persecution, reflect the destruction of the German-Jewish symbiosis under National Socialism.126 Aichinger’s hero Ellen, the daughter of a Nazi father and a mother classified as Jewish, participates as both a perpetrator and a victim. In a confrontation with her father, a Nazi police officer, the father turns out to be a man who has lost his integrity. Through this figure, Aichinger issues an indictment of the followers of Nazism, but the victims emerge as morally superior, even if they cannot escape death at the hands of their persecutors.
Aichinger was one of the few women authors affiliated with Group 47. She had been invited to the 1951 meeting and received the Prize of the Group in 1952. As an Austrian of partly Jewish descent, she stood out among the Group’s membership because of her experience and point of view. Her topic was the difficulties Austrians faced under National Socialism and racial discrimination. Her essay “Das vierte Tor” (“The Fourth Gate,” 1945) was the point in Austrian literature when the deportation of Jews was first addressed. The novel Die gröβere Hoffnung exposes the dire conditions faced by children of Jewish descent who tried to survive on their own in the occupied city.127
In keeping with its deliberately naïve children’s perspective, Die größere Hoffnung does not delve into politics or discuss the Nazi German occupation of Vienna. Instead, it focuses on the effects of Nazi policies and the segregation they produce in a once-integrated society. Families are torn apart, and children
In Die gröβere Hoffnung, the Nazis are neighbors and relatives turned against each other. The dominant perspective is that of Ellen, whose experience is paradigmatic of the broken Austrian-Jewish symbiosis. Ellen is straddling the fence between Jewish and Christian society—she is Catholic, her grandmother Jewish, and her father a Nazi. This constellation makes her an outsider to all of these segments of society. She spends most of her time with her Jewish friends, but she does not entirely fit in with them since she neither has to wear the Jewish star nor does she face immediate deportation. To minimize her privilege, she tries to be doubly helpful to the Jewish children, but most of her attempts fail since, as a child, her options are limited.
Lacking designations such as Nazi, Austrian, Catholic, or Jew, Aichinger’s narrative has a surreal quality, which is reinforced by the use of metaphors and allegories. These literary devices call to mind those in Drauβen vor der Tür, but they take a different trajectory. Rather than concealment, as in Borchert, Aichinger’s objective is exposing the racial persecution, the Nazi mentality, and the Holocaust, and to demonstrate the codes of Nazi language, which, as Ellen realizes, cannot be trusted. The more realistic episodes bring the social conditions into focus through dramatic encounters that help to clarify the situation in the 1930s and 1940s. The confrontation between the Nazi officer and his and his Jewish wife’s daughter Ellen is a key episode. Beyond the apparent conflict, the character constellation points to a past, where love and intermarriage between Jews and “Aryans” were common occurrences. Ellen is the product of such a union, but under the prevailing circumstances, she is an unwanted child left behind by her mother who has fled to the United States, and her father, who has become her political enemy.
In the encounter between daughter and father, the diction is concrete and to the point, sending a clear message: the Nazi father and his men are “Verirrte” (lost souls). Ellen, looking beyond appearances, realizes that the persecutors play a pathetic role. In order to gain power, they relinquish their autonomy.
Ellen’s father, with his shiny epaulettes and his arrogance, stands out as the officer in charge. To the children, including his daughter, he signifies the master race. He has no patience with the young people whom he believes to be Jewish and in no way connected to him. He plays with his revolver to show that he is master over life and death. To further display his power, he begins to interrogate the children, who are in violation of a Nazi ordinance that prohibits Jews from sitting on park benches or playing in a park. He inquires if they have the right to be in this park and demands their ID cards.
His decisive question pertains to race: he asks them if they are Aryan. None of his questions are about the children’s activities, which makes it clear that their fate is determined exclusively by their ancestry.131 The Nazi regime denies them their human and personal dignity, and they are forced to run and hide. At the opening of the encounter, Ellen’s father acts like a god who keeps the smaller creatures in check. Thus, the lines between perpetrators and victims are initially clearly drawn. The officer appears to be in total control of the subjugated collective of Jews, conceptualized as the inferior Other.
Aichinger, herself of mixed background, is keenly aware of the intimate ties between the victims and the perpetrators. In the father-daughter encounter, she demonstrates that politics cannot erase the power of family ties. Ellen turns the tables by calling the officer “Vater” (“Father”) to expose a relationship that empowers her and compromises the Nazi officer. The very existence of his child makes the father’s ties to a Jewish woman publicly known. Having a “Mischling,” a mixed-race child, with a mother living in the United States cannot but harm his career, considering that America was an enemy force and, in the Third Reich, relations between Aryans and Jews constituted the offense of race defilement.
By the same token, a father’s repudiation of his child is a transgression against the traditional patriarchal norms in Austria. From a Nazi point of view, Ellen’s father has defiled the race, but the Catholic mainstream would consider him a delinquent father. The character of the Nazi father thus symbolizes the incompatibility between traditional patriarchal norms and Nazi law. In his untenable situation, his ploy to make his daughter leave him alone doesn’t solve
Another direct confrontation between the persecutors and the persecuted children occurs in the chapter “Im Dienste einer fremden Macht” (“In the Service of an Alien Power”).135 Here, the Nazi characters are Hitler Youth boys. They proudly wear their uniforms and sing the sentimental military song “Die blauen Husaren.”136 These hints suggest that their imagination is dominated by visions of war and blood as the ultimate heroic feat: stomping horses, rattling sabers, and waving coats. Even though they are mere children, they are identified through uniforms, belts, belt buckles, and knives.137
There is an unexpected intrusion into the world of these boys: one of them discovers a German-English vocabulary book. The find arouses suspicion among the young Nazis and stirs their anti-Semitic rage since they suspect that the notebook belongs to Jewish children.138 Questions ensue about the
The differences between the children are the product of the difference in their socialization. The narrator suggests that the boys in uniform need a uniform to gain a sense of community—their ostensible self-confidence is false. In contrast, the Jewish children identify themselves as individuals; they study to expand their horizon for the sake of self-realization. The Nazi boys are conditioned to act aggressively, while the Jewish children embrace a peaceful demeanor. When the Hitler Youth attack the secret study place of the Jewish children, an old teacher challenges the intruders. Frustrated over being outmaneuvered intellectually, the young Nazis resort to violence. They may prevail in physical terms, but Aichinger’s narrator suggests that they are morally defeated by the teacher’s passive resistance. The Nazis, incapable of comprehending the old man’s strength of conviction, have no explanation other than that he serves an alien force. Everywhere in the novel, crude coercion is seen as inferior to the intellectual resistance of the intended Nazi victims. Another striking example is Ellen’s interrogation by a Nazi officer. She demands to be deported to “the East” so that she can be with her Jewish friends, and she stands her ground defying the ensuing beatings and threats.140
This discussion of postwar writing has revealed that 1945 was an ideological and generational watershed. Instead of allowing for a reconciliation as the term “Wiedergutmachung” (restitution or rectification) implies, the end of the war put the open conflicts to rest, but the calm was superficial. The end of the Third Reich required profound attitudinal changes not only in Germany and Austria, but also in the victor nations. The emerging democracies of West Germany and Austria and the Socialist regime in East Germany were predicated upon revised concepts of nation, citizenship, government and family.
Höß, Auschwitz, 5.
Witte and Tyas, Himmler’s Diary 1945.
Citations are to Höß, Auschwitz. Translations follow Paskuly, Death Dealer (trans. Andrew Pollinger).
Paskuly, 19.
Höß, 229.
Höß, 37–8.
Höß, 42; “He was my first kill!” Paskuly, Death Dealer, 56.
Höß, 56–7.
Theweleit, Männerphantasien (1977–1978); Theweleit/Turner, Carter and Conway, Male Fantasies; Mahler, Symbiose und Individuation; Mahler, Pine, and Bergman; Psychological Birth; Alice Miller, Am Anfang war Erziehung; Miller, For Your own Good (trans. Hildegard Hannum and Hunter Hannum). Here: „Die Kindheit Adolf Hitlers—vom verborgenen zum manifesten Grauen,“ Miller, Am Anfang war Erziehung, 169–228; “Adolf Hitler’s Childhood: From Hidden to Manifest Horror,” Miller/Hannum and Hannum, 142–96.
Höß, Auschwitz, 5.
Höß, 199.
Höß, 150.
Höß, 233–4.
Höß, 200.
Höß, 200.
Höß, 200.
Broszat, “Einleitung,” 11–2.
Anonymous, Woman in Berlin; Anonyma, Eine Frau in Berlin.
Connolly, “She screamed for help.”
Schnabel, “Marta Dietschy-Hillers,” Part 6; See also: Schnabel, Mehr als Anonyma.
Sander, BeFreier und BeFreite; Sander, Befreier und Befreite Das Buch zum Film. Sheila Johnson (“Helke Sander’s ‘BeFreier und Befreite,’” 81) contrasts the international success of Sander’s film with the controversy it provoked in Germany, and Gertrud Koch and Stuart Liebmann (“Blood, Sperm, and Tears”) intervene against the notion of “feminist revisionism,” which was used as an argument to inveigh against the film’s validity.
Fénelon, Sourcis Pour L’Orchestre.
Schlink, Der Vorleser.
Anonymous, Woman in Berlin; Anonyma, Eine Frau in Berlin.
Laurel Cohen-Pfister (“Rape, War, and Outrage,” 325) maintains that there is a difference between Hildegard Knef’s retrospective position in Helke Sander’s Befreier und Befreite and Anonyma’s immediacy as an eyewitness of very recent events.
Prager, “Occupation,” 67; Bisky, “Wenn Jungen Weltgeschichte spielen, haben Mädchen stumme Rollen,” 16.
Anonyma, Eine Frau in Berlin, 16.
Anonyma, 17.
Baer, Dismantling The Dream Factory.
Anonyma, Eine Frau in Berlin, 143.
For example, Stephen Brockmann (“From Nazism to Socialism”) describes the narrative by Anna Seghers (Der Mann und sein Name) as a “conversion narrative” that traces the transformation of Nazis into Socialists.
Jack Hamesh’s dates follow the information provided by Agence Bibliographique de l’Enseignement Supérieur (ABES). Accessed December 20, 2015. http://www.idref.fr/145669955.
Bachmann, Kriegstagebuch. Translations follow Bachmann, War Diary (trans. Mike Mitchell).
Vieth, “Ingeborg Bachmann,” 323.
Bachmann, Kriegstagebuch, 16.
Bachmann, 15.
Bachmann, 22.
Bachmann, 49.
Bachmann, 51.
Bachmann, 51; “Was our life together just a chance episode?” Bachmann/Mitchell, 47.
Bachmann, 51.
“Today we are standing on ruins, without a home, without parents, without a homeland, without hope and worst, without a future.” Bachmann/Mitchell, 47.
Bachmann, 48.
Diner, “Deutsche und Juden nach Auschwitz.”
Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich, Die Unfähigkeit zu trauern; Mitscherlich and Mitscherlich, Inability to Mourn (trans. Beverly Placzek).
Boog, Krebs, and Vogel, Germany and the Second World War, 225.
Böll, Briefe aus dem Krieg 1939–1945; Borchert, Allein mit meinem Schatten und dem Mond.
Serrier, “Günter Grass,” 2.
Hathaway, Desert Fox.
Zuckmayer, “Des Teufels General.” Translations follow Zuckmayer, The Devil’s General (trans. Ingrid Komar and Virginia Wurdak). The revised dedication of 1945 for Des Teufels General reads as follows: „Den ersten Entwurf zu diesem Stück widmete ich im Jahre 1942 DEM UNBEKANNTEN KÄMPFER. Jetzt widme ich es dem Andenken meiner von Deutschlands Henkern aufgehängten Freunden THEODOR HAUBACH, WILHELM LEUCHNER, GRAF HELLMUTH VON MOLTKE.“ (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1966). (In the year 1942 I dedicated the first draft of this play to the “UNKNOWN FIGHTER.” Now I dedicate it to the memory of my friends who were hanged by Germany’s executioners, THEODOR HAUBACH, WILHELM LEUCHNER, GRAF HELLMUTH VON MOLTKE.) This dedication is omitted in Komar and Wurdak’s translation.
Waine, “Zuckmayer’s Des Teufels General,” 257.
Brockmann, German Literary Culture, 45.
Weingran, “Des Teufels General” in der Diskussion.
Mitcham, Blitzkrieg No Longer, 14.
Zuckmayer, “Des Teufels General,” 499; “He is in full dress uniform, but his bearing and manner are casual, even somewhat sloppy. He still holds the empty glass in his hand and a cigarette dangles from the corner of his mouth. He can’t be older than forty-five, his face is intelligent, youthful, even boyish, despite his thinning hair. By nature it is a gay face, carefree, pleasant, and a little mischievous. Not it seems to be suffused with a perceptible nervous tension.” Zuckmayer/Komar and Wurdak, 3–4. [It should read correctly, “…with a barely noticeable nervous tension.” D.L.]
Cocks, “Sick Heil,” 113.
Zuckmayer, “Des Teufels General,” 504; “Of course, in the Hitler Youth no one gets engaged any more. That holds you up too long.” Zuckmayer/Komar and Wurdak, 7.
Cocks, 114.
Zuckmayer, “Des Teufels General,” 511.
Komar and Wurdak do not imitate the dated German usage and instead use “Russians” and “Russia.” Zuckmayer/Komar and Wurdak, 15, 17.
“We old party men, we didn’t have no time for careers. We was obliged first to ‘liquidate the enemy within.’ After that come business and family—I married into the hops business, ya know. But it didn’t pay off—Jews was in the competition and squeezed us out. Good buddy, that’s when ya learn ta hate. When the party come to power I made out a little better.” Zuckmayer/Komar and Wurdak, 12. [The translation renders “Alte Kämpfer” as “old party men” and then proceeds to assign the character of Pfundtmayer an awkward ungrammatical idiom that is inappropriate to his Bavarian dialect. D.L.]
Zuckmayer, “Des Teufels General,” 544.
Riefenstahl, Olympia.
“Broad shoulders, narrow hips, long skull,” Zuckmayer/Komar and Wurdak, 57.
Zuckmayer, “Des Teufels General,” 577–8; “Strapping girls wearing nothing but panties,” Zuckmayer/Komar and Wurdak, 58.
Zuckmayer, 577–8.
Zuckmayer, 558.
Zuckmayer, 558.
Zuckmayer, 566.
Zuckmayer, 566; “DIDDO: Sometimes I envy the Jews madly, I mean the ones outside. /HARRAS: Maybe we’ll become honorary Jews, us two.” Zuckmayer/Komar and Wurdak, 48.
Zuckmayer, 602.
Zuckmayer, 609.
Zuckmayer, 616.
Borchert, Drauβen vor der Tür. Translations follow Borchert, Man Outside (trans. David Porter).
Wolfgang-Borchert-Archiv.
Burgess, Life and Works.
Böll, Afterword.
Hanser, Noble Treason.
Böll, Briefe aus dem Krieg 1939–1945.
Taylor, Course of German History.
Böttiger, Die Gruppe 47, 94–5.
Inwood, Heidegger Dictionary, 131. “Thrownness” is associated with fear and boredom, and may involve a turning away signified by Beckmann’s attempts to leave the world.
The use of “girl” instead of “woman” is reminiscent of soldier slang and the term “Mädel.”
Reiko Tachibana (Narrative as Counter-Memory, 90) examines Borchert’s place within the postwar spectrum of Trümmerliteratur.
Burchard, “Nuremberg Trial”; Atkins, Holocaust Denial.
See: Waine, “kleiner Mann.”
“Only later did it become obvious that the authors of the Group had been preoccupied with the war and the postwar period, but that during the 1950s they had not thematized the destruction of the European Jews, or that the veterans had rarely confronted their role in the war and the Third Reich, or taken notice of the fact that the Group had problems with writers returning from exile.”
Arnold, “Aufstieg und Ende der Gruppe 47.”
„Erst viel später, als die Gruppe 47 längst Geschichte war, fielen Schatten auf die Biographien einiger Mitglieder: So hatte Günter Eich ein Hörspiel im nazistischen Zeitgeist geschrieben; Alfred Andersch hatte sich bei der Reichsschrifttumskammer angebiedert, indem er ihr die Trennung von seiner jüdischen Frau mitteilte. Und dass Günter Grass bis 2006 verschwieg, Mitglied der Waffen-SS gewesen zu sein, hat ihm gewiss die Nicht-Aufnahme in die Gruppe oder einen späteren Rausschmiss erspart—denn da war Richter eindeutig.“ Arnold, “Aufstieg und Ende der Gruppe 47.” (Much later, when the Group 47 was history, did shadow fall upon the biographies of some of its members. Günter Eich, for example, had written a radio play in the spirit of National Socialism; Alfred Andersch had curried favors with the Reich Literature Chamber by informing it about his separation from his Jewish wife. And the fact that Günter Grass had kept his membership in the Waffen-SS a secret until 2006 most certainly had spared him non-admittance to, or a later dismissal from, the Group—[Hans-Werner] Richter was unambiguous in such matters.)
Barthold C. Witte (“Two Catastrophes,” 240) notes that the German self-perception of being loyal, which was highly rated on the scale of values, was out of keeping with the impression that neighboring countries had of German fickleness and unreliability.
Omer Bartov (Hitler’s Army, 2) discusses the Nazi doctrine of all-or-nothing war.
Borchert, Drauβen vor der Tür, 38; “Denazified themselves. Just an expression, you know. It’s a sort of private joke amongst us. Yes, those old people of yours didn’t feel like it. There they were one morning lying blue and stiff in the kitchen.” Borchert/Porter, 116.
Böll, “Der Zug war pünktlich.” Citations follow this edition. Translations follow Böll, Train was on Time (trans. Leila Vennewitz).
Conard, Understanding Heinrich Böll, 4.
Kocfeldová, “Heinrich Böll,” 8.
Lange, “Heinrich Böll.”
“disturbing statements”
Böll, “Der Zug war pünktlich,” 116; “More S.S. troops.” Böll/Vennewitz, Train was on Time, 62.
Böll, 117; “the lieutenant’s shoulder patches lay so heavily on his shoulders, so heavily, and you could tell that he was marked for death.” Böll/Vennewitz, 63.
Böll, 117; “I made fun of him, of the way he looked like a Hitler Youth kid, and he was marked for death. I could tell from his face and he was killed.” Böll/Vennewitz, 63.
Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews.
Bartov, Erased, 62.
Böll, “Der Zug war pünktlich,” 90–1; “Come Holy Ghost; then the Credo again because it was so wonderfully complete; then the Good Friday intercession, because it was so wonderfully all-embracing, it even included the unbelieving Jews. That made him think of Cernauti, and he said a special prayer for the Jews of Cernauti and for the Jews of Lvov, and no doubt there were Jews in Stanislav too, and in Kolomyya … then another Paternoster, and then a prayer of his own; it was a great place to pray, sitting beside those two silent men” Böll/Vennewitz, Train was on Time, 31.
Böll, 66; “‘Why, I might want to hurl myself under the wheels, I might want to desert … eh? What’s the hurry, I might go crazy. I’ve a perfect right to go crazy. I don’t want to die, that’s what’s so horrible—that I don’t want to die. …’ ‘Don’t say any more, I’ll get on all right there’s always a spot somewhere.’” Böll/Vennewitz, 3.
Böll, 95; “A Frenchman was standing there, a real lower-middle-class type, his pipe between his teeth, his eyes full of that truly French derision—ponderous, bourgeois—and the man had known nothing.” Böll/Vennewitz, 37.
Böll, 95; “That glass cabinet: the Germans had smashed it up. And burned holes in the carpet with their cigarette butts, and slept on the couch with their whores and messed it all up. He spat with contempt.” Böll/Vennewitz, 37.
Böll, 85.
Böll, 104; “My God, he groaned, so he seduced us, what else is there to say? We were all like that … except one. He refused.” Böll/Vennewitz, 47.
Böll, 105; “After that I never enjoyed anything again, and I never will. I am scared to look at a woman. The whole time I was home I just lay around in a kind of stupor, crying away like some idiot child, and my mother thought I had some awful disease. But how could I tell her about it, it was something you can’t tell anyone,” Böll/Vennewitz, 48.
Böll, 90.
Böll, 99; “The unshaven soldier was silent. There was hardly any life left in him. He had not been able to sleep at night; the spark in him had gone out, and his eyes were like blind mirrors, and his cheeks yellow and cavernous, and what had been the need of a shave was now a beard, a reddish-black beard below the thick hair on his forehead.” Böll/Vennewitz, 41.
Böll, 107.
Berszinski, Modernisierung im Nationalsozialismus?, 58–60.
Böll, “Der Zug war pünktlich,” 115.
Böll, 93; “Never again will I be in Germany. Germany’s gone. The train left Germany while I was asleep. Somewhere there was a line, an invisible line across a field, … and the train passed callously over it, and I was no longer in Germany.” Böll/Vennewitz, Train was on Time, 34.
Böll, 90; “For only a tenth of a second was I allowed to see my only love, who was perhaps no more than an apparition.” Böll/Vennewitz, 30–1.
Böll, 89; “Is it such a disgrace, then, to long to know what forehead belonged to those eyes, what mouth and what breast and what hands? Would it have been asking too much to be allowed to know what heart belonged to them, a girl’s heart perhaps,” Böll/Vennewitz, 30.
Böll, 144–5.
Böll, 90.
Böll, 89.
Böll, 100; See: Schütter, Männer der Waffen-SS.
“dark-clad figures,” Böll/Vennewitz, Train was on Time, 43.
Böll, “Der Zug war pünktlich,” 82–4; See: Lewy, Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies.
McDonough, Holocaust, 69.
Nowak, Pelikan, and Wodak, “Wir sind alle unschuldige Täter!”
Böll, “Nicht nur zur Weihnachtszeit,” 13; “During the years 1939 to 1945 there was a war on. In wartime there is a lot of singing, shooting, talking, fighting, starving, and dying—and bombs are dropped, all disagreeable things with which I have no intention of boring my contemporaries.” Böll, “Christmas not Once a Year” (trans. Leila Vennewitza), 727.
Aichinger, Die gröβere Hoffnung. Translations follow Aichinger, Herod’s Children (trans. Cornelia Schaeffer).
Aichinger, “Das vierte Tor.”
Aichinger, Die gröβere Hoffnung, 8–9.
Aichinger, 50.
Aichinger, 48; “Bootsteps crushed the gravel, purposeless and self-satisfied as are only the steps of those gone astray.” Aichinger/Schaeffer, 40.
Aichinger, 49.
Aichinger, 49; “This was the man who had asked Ellen to forget him. But can the word forget the lips that have spoken it?” Aichinger/Schaeffer, 41.
Aichinger, 50.
Aichinger, 50.
Aichinger, 81–8.
Aichinger, 82.
Aichinger, 82.
Aichinger, 83.
Aichinger, 82–3.
Aichinger, 200–2.